by Russ Harris
In the Old Testament of the Bible, God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into him through the nostrils. In ancient Greek mythology, man was created out of mud by the God Prometheus, then the Goddess Athene breathed life into him. And in the ‘contemplative’ or ‘mystical’ branches of all the world’s most popular religions — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Taoism — there are breathing exercises designed to help one access a higher state of awareness, or a direct experience of the divine.
So how do we explain this strong connection between breath and spirituality? There are many contributing factors. First and foremost is the obvious link between breathing and life. As long as you’re breathing, you’re alive — which means there is always something purposeful you can do. Another factor is that breathing exercises are often quite soothing or relaxing. They can help us to access a sense of inner peace; to find a safe, calm place in the midst of an emotional storm. A third factor is that we can use our breath to anchor ourselves in the present. When we’re all caught up in our thoughts and feelings, we can focus on our breath to ground ourselves and reconnect with our here-and-now experience.
Yet a fourth factor is that breathing can serve as a metaphor for ‘letting go’. Our breath flows in and out all day long, and most of the time, we don’t try to control it; we let it come and go as it pleases. But, if for some reason we try to hold it in, we find we can’t do so for very long. When we hold our breath in, the tension rapidly builds; the internal pressure increases and all manner of unpleasant feelings arise in our body. And then, when we let it go again, the sense of release is instant and profound.
In later chapters, we will explore all of these factors and more but, for now, we’ll focus on the breath and letting go. I’m going to invite you to try a little exercise. You may be able to do it while still reading, or you may need to read the instructions first and then put the book down to do it.
Take A Breath, Hold and Let Go
Slowly take a large breath in and once your lungs are filled with air, hold your breath.
Hold the breath for as long as you possibly can.
Notice how, as you keep the breath trapped inside your body, the pressure steadily builds.
Notice what happens in your chest, neck and abdomen.
Notice the tension building and the pressure rising.
Notice the changing feelings in your head, neck, shoulders, chest and abdomen.
And hold that breath.
Keep holding.
Notice how the sensations grow stronger and more unpleasant; how your body tries ever more forcefully to make you exhale.
Observe those physical sensations as if you are a curious child, who has never encountered anything like this before.
And when you can’t hold your breath a moment longer, slowly and, ever so gently, release it.
And as you let it go, savour the experience.
Appreciate the simple pleasure of breathing out.
Notice the letting go.
Notice the release of tension.
Notice your lungs deflating and your shoulders dropping.
Appreciate the simple pleasure of letting go.
***
How did you find that experience? Were you able to appreciate it? Did you notice a sense of grounding or centring yourself? Perhaps a sense of calmness or stillness?
How often in our day-to-day existence do we hold on to things, refusing stubbornly to let go? We hold on to old hurts, grudges and grievances. We hold on to unhelpful attitudes and prejudices. We hold on to notions of blame and unfairness. We hold on to self-limiting beliefs, old failures and painful memories. We hold on to unrealistic expectations of ourselves, the world or others. We hold on to stories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’, that pull us into fruitless struggles with reality.
So what if we could get better at ‘letting go’? What if we could loosen our grip and stop holding on so tightly? What if we could catch ourselves in the act of holding on to anxiety, frustration, criticism, judgement, resentment or blame and use our breath to remind us to ‘let it go’? What difference might that make to our relationships, our health and our vitality?
I now invite you to try another exercise, a little easier than the last one.
Take A Breath, Count To Three
Take a deep breath and hold it for a count of three.
Let the breath leave your lungs as slowly as possible.
As you breathe out, let your shoulders drop and feel your shoulder blades sliding down your back.
Once again notice the sense of release.
Appreciate the simple pleasure of exhaling.
Notice what it’s like to let . . . it . . . go.
I encourage you to try this exercise regularly throughout the day and see what difference it makes. Try it when you are holding on tightly to something — some hurt, resentment or blame that is draining away your vitality. Just breathe, hold and exhale. Many people also find it helpful to silently say something like, ‘Letting go’.
Suppose you’re stewing over that fight you had with your partner, or replaying the unkind comments your boss made at work, or giving yourself a guilt trip about the way you lost your temper with the kids, or dwelling on how unfairly life has treated you. These are all forms of ‘holding on tightly’. And you don’t need me to tell you that it doesn’t help; that it merely increases your stress and drains your vitality. So once you have caught yourself holding on, the next step is really very simple: take a deep breath, hold it for three and then, very slowly, let . . . it . . . go.
Chapter 8
THE THIRD WAY
While I was writing this chapter; on board a plane, a curious thing happened. The man behind me asked me to put my seat forward because he was trying to write on his laptop computer and my seat was cramping his space. I explained to him that I was sorry for the inconvenience, but I had put my seat back -wards to give me more room to write on my own computer and I politely suggested he might like to do the same. He didn’t like that idea and asked me again to move my seat forward. I noticed he had an empty seat next to him and suggested he might like to sit there. ‘No thanks,’ he said, ‘I want to sit by the window.’ I replied, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I want to sit with my seat back and I do have the right to do so.’ He was furious about this and said, ‘Right then, well, I’ll just have to make myself comfortable, won’t I?’ and he forcefully banged his knees into the back of my seat. I pondered what to do; he was bigger, younger, stronger and tougher than me and I didn’t want to aggravate him. On the other hand, I didn’t want to let him bully me into putting my seat upright either. So I thought to myself, I’ll just ride this out for a few minutes; after all, it’s probably far more uncomfortable for him, pounding his knees into the chair, than it is for me on the other side, and if he doesn’t settle down, I’ll call the flight attendant. So I shifted in my chair, found a position in which his blows had minimal effect, and started typing away on my computer.
For the first minute or so, his pounding was quite annoying, but as I got absorbed in my writing, it faded into the background and, as I had expected, over the space of a few minutes, he settled down. Still, every five minutes or so, he’d bang the back of my seat a few times, just to let me know he was still angry. And because the chair beside him was empty, and he was careful as to when he made his moves, the flight attendants didn’t notice, and nor did the other passengers (I assume).
As time went on, I began to find these outbursts quite amusing. At first my amusement stemmed from an attitude of ‘holier than thou’; I was looking down at him, as if I was somehow superior. I thought of him as a spoilt brat having a tantrum because he can’t get his own way. But after a while, I let go of my smugness as I recognised that I, too, often have my own tantrums, and while I never resort to physical aggression, there are plenty of times that I have snapped or yelled at my loved ones, or sulked and fretted when I didn’t get my own way. I re
member how furious I was when my son was diagnosed with autism; how I raged against reality. And sometimes when I couldn’t contain it any longer, I took out all that pent-up anger on my wife — criticising her, judging her and blaming her (as if she didn’t have enough to cope with already; as if she wasn’t hurting just as much as I was).
Don’t we all have these temper tantrums at times? It’s easy for us to judge others as being childish or spoilt or overly aggressive, but truth be told, there’s a little child inside all of us who really wants to have his or her own way, and acts childishly when he or she doesn’t get it.
After this insight, I reflected on how unpleasant it is to be caught up in anger or frustration and how uncomfortable we often feel later — guilty, embarrassed or even angry at ourselves — once we realise how badly we have behaved. And at that point, I started to feel compassion for this man behind me. Clearly he was suffering and clearly the situation was hurting him a lot more than me.
The intermittent bursts of knee-knocking continued for about twenty minutes before they finally stopped. And then, about ten minutes later, something wonderful happened. The man behind me stuck his head over the back of my seat and said, ‘I’m really sorry, mate. I don’t know what I was doing.’ His anger had completely melted and his face had a lovely, warm softness to it. ‘I’m so embarrassed. I’ve just had a shit of a day and I took it out on you. I’m really sorry.’ Then he stuck his hand through the gap between our seats, offering a handshake.
‘No worries, mate,’ I said, clasping his hand warmly. ‘I’m actually grateful to you.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Well, I was just writing about you in a book that’s going to be published in a few months’ time — and now you’ve given me a lovely ending to the story.’
‘Mate,’ he said, his face beaming, ‘that’s great. That makes my heart swell.’
Wouldn’t it be great if these sorts of incidents always had such good outcomes? Obviously this man had been totally lost in the smog; note his words: ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’ However, when he eventually got present, he was big enough to acknowledge his error and make amends. Unfortunately, in everyday life, it often doesn’t turn out so positively. And this is in large part because we grow up in a society that doesn’t teach us how to handle strong emotions effectively. Most of us, by the time we reach adulthood, know only two ways of dealing with painful feelings: control or be controlled.
Control or Be Controlled
As infants, toddlers and young children, we are largely controlled by our feelings. Fear, anger, sadness, guilt, frustration and anxiety: these emotions, and many others, push children around as if they are remote-controlled robots. If anger shows up, they shout or yell or lash out, or stomp their feet. If fear shows up, they hide or cry or run away. If sadness or disappointment shows up, they sulk or cry or bawl.
Fortunately, as adults, we are much less controlled by our feelings, and this is a good thing. We would all be in big trouble if our feelings controlled us. Imagine if you were at the mercy of your fear, anger, sadness and guilt; if it pushed you around exactly as it did when you were a child. How difficult would life be for you?
Of course, just like that man on the plane, we all allow our emotions to control us at times. We may lose our temper, get carried away by our fears, find ourselves overwhelmed with sadness, get crushed with guilt, or go into a fit of blind rage. But fortunately, this happens much less than it did in childhood (at least, for most people). And this is because, as we grew older, we learned all sorts of ways to control our feelings.
For example, we learned how to distract ourselves from unpleasant emotions via food, music, TV, books or games. And as we grew older still, the potential distractions multiplied: exercise, work, study, hobbies, religion, computer games, email, gambling, sex, pornography, music, sport, drugs, alcohol, gardening, walking the dog, cooking, dancing and so on.
We also learned how to escape unpleasant feelings by avoiding the situations where they were most likely to occur. In other words, we learned to withdraw or stay away from the people, places, activities or tasks we found difficult or challenging.
Then there are all those thinking strategies we developed that, at times, could give us some relief from emotional pain. You probably have dozens of these strategies, such as:
• constructive problem solving
• writing lists
• looking at the situation from a different perspective
• blaming or criticising others
• vigorously defending your position
• positive affirmations
• telling yourself inspirational quotes such as, ‘This shall pass’ or ‘What does not hurt me makes me stronger’
• trivialising the issue or pretending it’s not important
• comparing yourself to others who are worse off.
And last but not least, we have all discovered that putting substances into our bodies — whether it be chocolate, ice-cream, pizza, toast, tea, coffee, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, herbal remedies or prescription medication — often only gives temporary relief from painful feelings.
And yet, even with all these clever ways to control our feelings, we continue to suffer psychologically. We are not free from emotional pain for long. Think of the happiest day of your life; how long did those joyous, happy feelings last before some anxiety, frustration, disappointment or irritation show up?
The fact is that to live a full human life is to experience the full range of human emotions — not just the ones that ‘feel good’. Our feelings are like the weather, continually changing: at times very pleasant, at other times extremely uncomfortable. And what would happen if we went through life believing, ‘We should have good weather every day. There must be something seriously wrong if it’s cold and wet outside.’ If this was our attitude, how much would we struggle with reality? How much would our life shrink if we believed, ‘I can’t do the things that really matter to me, or be the person I want to be, unless the weather is good’?
When we talk about the weather this way it seems ridiculous. We know we can’t control the weather, so we don’t even try to. We let the weather do what it does and we change our clothes to adapt. But when it comes to emotions, most of us do the opposite; we try as hard as we can to get control of them, and this is quite natural. After all, everyone wants to feel good, and no one wants to feel bad. So we try to push our unwanted feelings away with quick fixes of ‘feel good’ activities, and this is reinforced by all the people out there who claim they can help us: Buy a new car! Go on a holiday! Whiten your teeth! Have a Botox injection! Drink our excellent bourbon! Try our delicious new ice-cream! Buy our product and you too can be as happy as the young, fit, healthy, beautiful, slim, sun-tanned, smiling person in this advert. And, of course, many of these things do give us pleasant feelings, but how long do they last? A few minutes? Perhaps a few hours?
As we journey through life, we all experience intense and uncomfortable emotions that we can’t simply turn off at the flick of a switch. And you’ve undoubtedly discovered that often the strategies we use to control our emotions tend to impair our quality of life in the long term. This is most obvious when it comes to things such as drugs, alcohol, tobacco, chocolate and gambling, but if you look closely, with an open mind, you’ll find it applies to any control strategy that we use excessively or rigidly.
Even something as healthy as exercise will become problematic if we use it excessively or rigidly to try to control our feelings. For example, some people suffering from anorexia exercise vigorously every day and, in the short term, this helps them to control their feelings of anxiety — to push away all those fears about getting fat — but in the long term, it keeps their bodies in a state of extremely unhealthy thinness. This is obviously very different from exercising flexibly and being guided by core values about looking after your health and wellbeing.
Often, the disappointments and setbacks we encounter when we
attempt to control our emotions just spur us on to try even harder, to find even cleverer ways to control how we feel. The hope is that one day we will find the ultimate strategy; one that will give us excellent control of our feelings. But sooner or later, we realise this is a lost cause. To emphasise this point, whenever I give workshops or lectures, I ask all the parents in the room to raise their hands. Usually, this is well over three-quarters of the audience. I say, ‘Having a child enriches your life enormously and gives you some of the most wonderful feelings you will ever have — love, joy and tenderness, the likes of which you could never have imagined. But are those the only feelings that children give you?’
Everyone shakes their heads and says, ‘Nooooo!’
‘What other feelings do children give you?’ I ask.
There is a cacophony of responses: fear, anger, exhaustion, worry, guilt, sadness, pain, frustration, rejection, boredom and rage to name a few.
And there you have it: the things that make life rich, full and meaningful give rise to a wide range of feelings — not just ‘good’ ones. (This, of course, holds true for every loving relationship, not just those with our children. No wonder the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people’.)
Unfortunately, this realisation can take a long time to come. It may take us a hundred self-help books, or twenty years of therapy, or five different types of prescription medication, or a dozen self-empowerment courses, or decades of silent struggle, or a lifetime of seeking advice from various ‘experts’ before we truly realise the simple truth: when it comes to painful emotions, we have not been well educated by our society. We have grown up learning only two ways of responding: control or be controlled. And if these are our only two options, will we ever find inner fulfilment?
